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Dr. alexa yunes-koch
Executive Director, Creator
Dr. Alexa Yunes-Koch is the founder and creator of Mondo Method, and co-owner of parent company Yunes Educational Services. She earned a PhD in Education with an emphasis in behavioral neurobiology from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her research focused on the neuroscience of stress, teacher-student interactions, learning and motivation, trauma, and emotional regulation. Alexa has over 10 years of teaching experience ranging from the PreK-12 context to the collegiate level, and has presented nationally and internationally in Texas, Nebraska, Nevada, Illinois, and New York, as well as Mexico and Scotland.
As a stress and behavior specialist, Alexa has worked with teachers, students, parents, and professionals around the world to provide practical strategies and resources to manage stress and change behavior. Alexa's workshops and strategies are all about transforming environments to be enjoyable within challenging contexts through neuroscience-based strategies that humanize and support all team members.
Alexa has collaborated with the Walt Disney Company to create socioemotional learning activities featuring Mondo Method, and the method is now being used across school districts and organizations to improve and optimize learning, living, and work environments for adults and children alike.
About the method
What is Mondo?
Mondo Method is a new and innovative way of approaching stress management and behavior challenges. It is revolutionary in its recognition that 1) words without practical and enjoyable strategies cannot bring about change, 2) any effective intervention must be tailored to what the people involved actually enjoy and want to be doing, and 3) it is grounded in research and widely recognized theories from 6 different disciplines, making it the first method of its kind
How does it work?
From exploring the brain's response to stress through neuroanatomy, to examining how chemical reinforcement shapes behavior patterns and understanding the evolutionary roots of different actions, Mondo Method covers a broad spectrum of topics. It provides a comprehensive insight into what's happening during stressful situations or unwanted behaviors—and why.
A key feature of the method is that all of these complex ideas are brought together in an accessible, simple way. With resources like workbooks, activity cards, posters, and more, the method is made suitable for people of any age and in any situation. Not an easy feat when dealing with 6 different and intricate disciplines!
Mondo Method also promotes 5 types of interventions, including Connection, Support, Sensory, Playfulness, and Cognitive. The science supporting each type of strategy and intervention paints the broad picture of what is needed to transform behavior, but participants are then encouraged to individualize and personalize each type of strategy as much as possible to fit their own personalities, preferences, and contexts.
Mondo Method features 3 steps and 1 proprietary explanation of the stress cycle.
STEP 1. Know: Mondo works by first explaining the neurobiology of stress and behavior in a simple, powerful way.
STEP 2. Recognize: Participants then gain tools for identifying the patterns in their daily lives.
STEP 3. Transform: Finally, participants learn practical strategies they can tailor to their own preferences and apply in their own context, without adding tedious work or unwanted tasks.
Where did Mondo come from?
The method itself was first developed during Dr. Alexa Yunes-Koch’s Phd program, where she created the Autonomic Safety and Neural Integration (ASNI) framework for her dissertation on teacher stress and student behavior. Formerly known as STRESSED, the method was created to help people navigate stressful situations and change behaviors. Alexa and Claudia Yunes developed the strategies for Mondo together, drawing largely from Claudia’s 30 years of expertise working with children and adults. Claudia had tremendous success transforming learning and work environments throughout her career, and Alexa devoted her time in graduate school to figuring out the scientific reasons for her mom’s success with stressful situations.
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How is Mondo different from so many other stress and behavior methods out there?
Highly interdisciplinary
Mondo brings together key ideas from 6 disciplines:
- Behavioral neurobiology
- Psychology
- Sociology
- Behavioral economics
- Affective neuroscience
- Evolutionary biology
Emphasis on the importance of patterns BETWEEN people
Emphasis on the bidirectional relationship between people, meaning that it focuses on how one person’s behavior impacts the other’s, from a neurobiological perspective, and vice versa. Many programs and methods are designed to help adults and children learn to self-regulate, but few are designed with the core principle that every behavior is part of an interpersonal dynamic that needs to be understood and addressed from both sides.
Focus on enjoying the strategies and interventions
Many individuals interventions focus on getting people (kids or adults) to do certain predetermined things rather than encouraging more of what brings them fulfillment and joy. Many organizations and programs add initiatives to try to change behaviors or help with stress, but those initiatives often require them to do things that they do not want to be doing, which inadvertently makes things worse. From forced reflections at work, to tedious exercises for team building, we all know what it’s like to be doing something we don’t want to be doing and feeling like it is a waste of time at best and counterproductive at worst.
Mondo, on the other hand, is all about doing things we really enjoy, even in the midst of stressful situations or tedious work tasks. Why? Because when we are doing things we enjoy is when we biologically have the most access to choosing our behaviors, how we think, and how we interact with others. The strategies in Mondo are largely about adding simple things we enjoy to things that are otherwise mundane or that we don’t necessarily want to be doing.
Highly individualized and personalized
The science of behavior teaches us that there are patterns in how people behave when they don’t like something, and how they behave when they do like something. So, whether a person is neurotypical or neurodivergent, working in a corporate position or teaching in an elementary school, or simply sitting at home with their family, the same principle applies: we all behave in better ways when we feel that we are surrounded by things we like than we do when we are surrounded by things we don’t like. Mondo embraces this simple idea and gives us strategies to transform any situation, even if it requires some creativity within more traditional, challenging, or structured environments.
How does it compare to other popular methods?
CBT (Cognitive behavioral therapy)
CBT shares a lot of the same principles as Mondo. The behavioral activation and cognitive restricting from CBT align with everything Mondo proposes. However, Mondo is different in a few key ways. First, Mondo proposes that we can’t change behaviors without understanding the brain and it’s physiological stress response. Second, Mondo places a strong emphasis on the bidirectional exchanges that cause behavior patterns between individuals. And third, Mondo highlights the importance of understanding the chemical reinforcement and evolutionary purpose of different behaviors.
The main issue with CBT is that it often requires individuals to think rationally about their behaviors, which as Mondo Method explains, is very difficult to do since oxygen isn’t reaching the rational part of the brain when we are being irrational. For example, in the middle of an argument with a co-worker or when a child is throwing a tantrum, asking them/us to think about how and why we are behaving that way is not helpful. Mondo gives us tools to talk to the body in those moments through playfulness, connection, and sensory safety cues, so that we can get that rational part of the brain back online.
ABA (Applied behavior analysis)
While both Mondo Method and ABA focus on finding patterns of behavior, the key distinction is in what happens once that pattern is identified. Mondo is all about humanizing, individualizing, and personalizing intervention strategies to ensure that each child or adult is feeling seen, heard, and valued. Additionally, Mondo focuses strongly on identifying the root cause of a behavior, and seeking connection and playfulness to address underlying issues. ABA, on the other hand, tends to prioritize compliance, and focuses on reducing undesired behaviors rather than understanding them. ABA also prioritizes gathering and analyzing data, while Mondo prioritizes the quality of experience for people involved.
We focus on building connection and making sure people feel safe, valued, happy, fulfilled, and able to communicate their needs and wants in constructive ways. We also focus on the idea that we should tailor and individualize regulation strategies, so nobody is being forced to do things they don’t want to be doing or treated like a problem to be fixed.
PBIS (Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports)
PBIS is a good compliment for Mondo Method, but there are a few big differences. We focus a lot on the connection between teacher well-being and student behavior rather than just improving student behavior. We also emphasize the importance of understanding the root cause of a behavior instead of just wanting to erase negative behaviors without understanding them first. Another big difference is that for more severe behavior challenges, PBIS often requires external or third-party support, while Mondo Method gives teachers and parents more strategies to connect with those kids and build playful, trusting relationships to then see the changes they want to see. We try to avoid making kids feel like problems to be fixed, or like they are “different” or “broken,” which can happen when kids are bouncing around from specialist to specialist, intervention to intervention. So, we focus on humanizing, understanding the biological cause of behaviors, and creating personalized strategies that kids enjoy and want to be doing, without having to be removed from their classroom, home, etc.
Team Building, Feedback Systems, Performance Reviews, and Other Organizational Initiatives
The purpose of these types of organizational initiatives is to improve productivity and outcomes, but they more often than not end up having the opposite impact. When we ask team members to fill out pages and pages of paperwork, give up their work time to participate in forced socialization without meaningfully engaged leadership, or roll out an initiative without understanding its impact on the day-to-day work of our team members, we are bound to see a decrease in morale and a diminution of loyalty, innovation, and productivity. In order for team members to work well together, be creative, innovate, take risks, and speak openly about their concerns or ideas, they have to feel a biological sense of safety. Otherwise, the parts of the brain responsible for those positive qualities are highjacked by the survival parts of the brain and reinforced by neuromodulators, making it harder and harder to transform an organization’s culture. Mondo’s strategies for organizations are largely about injecting moments of reprieve in the midst of stressful situations, trusting employees and team members to know what is best as long as they are meeting their goals, helping each other and growing together, humanizing each other and making each team member feel seen and valued for their unique strengths, and gaining physiological strategies for co-regulating during stressful situations. Each organization working with Mondo generates different strategies to fit their unique context, all grounded in the same science and framework.
Where does the name "mondo" come from?
Mondo the Hippo
Mondo is the name of the hippo featured in all of the children’s resources Alexa and Claudia have created. Mondo means "world" in Italian, and the goal in all that we do together is to make the world a better place.
While this cute little guy only appears in the teaching materials we create for early childhood educators, his name is a reminder of the core goal of these neuroscience-based strategies for changing behavior and managing stress: to make the world a better place.